Craig Schuftan

Resist Aggression

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:04:48 +1100

"We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!"

Dialogue from 'The Wild Angels' (1966), sampled in Primal Scream, 'Loaded', 1990

"We're beginning a new era. This new era could be full of promise, an age of freedom, a time of peace for all peoples. But if history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression, or it will destroy our freedoms."

George Bush, August 1990

Play Loud, Play Quiet (Sound Quality Mix) by Schuftronics

Like we're gonna die young

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 01:35:03 +1100

"Churches once held sacred are now but heaps of dust and ashes; and yet we have our minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we were going to die tomorrow; yet we build as though we were going to live always in this world. Our walls shine with gold, our celings also... yet Christ dies before our doors naked and hungry in the person of his poor."

St Jerome, letter to a friend, 396.

A suitor for agreement

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:04:47 +1100

"Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure of beauty is curious. It aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds. Hence it tends toward a judgement of its own validity. And like every other rational judgement, this one makes implicit appeal to the community of rational beings. This is what Kant meant when he said that, in the judgement of taste, I am 'a suitor for agreement', expressing my judgement not as a private opinion but as a binding verdict that would be agreed upon by all."

Roger Scruton, 'Beauty', 2009

"You tell me right now: what's wrong with the righteous brothers?"

"Nothing, I just prefer the other one..."

"Bullshit!"

High Fidelity, 2000

Keep going

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:08:54 +1100

"Few people would fall in love had they never heard of love. Passion and expression are not really seperable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends toward self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.

In the absence of this rhetoric, the emotions would no doubt still exist, but accidentally, lacking recognition, and they would be treated as unmentionable peculiarities."

Denis De Rougement, 1962

How You Became What You Are

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 01:27:34 +1100

"When I want to make a statue of a beautiful woman, I have a great number of them undress; all offer both beautiful parts and badly shaped parts; I take from each what is beautiful."

"And how do you recognise what is beautful?"

"Obviously, from its conformity with the antique, which I have thoroughly studied."

"And if the antique did not exist, how would you go about it? You do not respond. Listen to me then, for I will try to explain to you how the ancients, who had no antiquities, proceeded, how you became what you are, and the logic of a routine to which, for better or worse, you adhere without ever having questioned its origin."

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), 'The Salon of 1767'.

Image: Linder Sterling, 'Sordide Sentimentale', 1981-2009

Here is the news

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:41:13 +1100

'When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women’s faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? What is the context?

A woman’s appearance is more often called to her attention for a political reason than as a constituent of genuine attraction and desire. We can learn to get better at telling the difference - a liberating skill in itself. We need not condemn lust, seduction, or physical attraction—a much more democratic and subjective quality than the market would like us to discover—we need only to reject political manipulation.'

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 1990

Nothing to lose

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 22:02:52 +1100

'Its time now for all the "fortunate" ones, the cheerleaders and football jocks to strip down naked in front of the entire school at an assembly and plead with every ounce of their souls for mercy and forgiveness, and to admit they are wrong. They are representatives of gluttony and selfish values, and to say that they are sorry for condoning these things, no that will not be enough...'

Kurt Cobain, Journals.

'Come out to play, make up the rules, I know I hope to buy the truth, tore off your clothes, I'll see you in court, we know we'll lose but we won't be bored.'

Kurt Cobain, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', live at the OK Hotel, April 1991

'We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom'

Rauol Vaneigem, 1967

No fun

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:45:04 +1100

Sir,

The Times has just announced the projected demolition of the Chinese quarter in London. We protest against such moral ideas in town planning, ideas which must obviously make England more boring than it has in recent years already become. The only pageants you have left are a coronation from time to time, an occasional Royal marriage which seldom bears fruit; nothing else. The disappearance of pretty girls, of good family especially, will become rarer and rarer after the razing of Limehouse. Do you honestly believe that a gentleman can amuse himself in Soho? We hold that the so-called modern town planning which you recommend is fatuously idealistic and unnecessary. The sole end of architecture is to serve the passions of men.

Anyway, it is inconvenient that this Chinese quarter of London should be destroyed before we have the opportunity to visit it and carry out certain psycho-geographical experiments we are at present undertaking. Finally, if modernization appears to you, as it does to us, to be historically necessary, we would counsel you to carry your enthusiasm into areas more urgently in need of it, that is to say, your political and moral institutions.

Yours faithfully,

Michele Bernstein, G-E. Debord, Gil G. Wolman,

POTLATCH

Bernstein, Debord, Wolman; Letter to the Times, October 1955.

National malaise

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:53:43 +1100

'I see my sister and her husband. They're living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids, they're working hard. You can see something in their eyes... I asked my sister, 'what do you do for fun?' 'I don't have any fun,' she says. She wasn't kidding.'

Bruce Springsteen, 1979

'I was a cub reporter in Minneapolis in the summer of 1979. Some guy in the suburbs had wigged out. He was a young guy with an older brother in Vietnam if I remember correctly. He had a gripe about the local cops. So he climbed up the local water tower, fixed himself up with some food and blankets about 100 feet off the ground, and refused to come down until somebody addressed his greivances. So I spent a brilliant warm july afternoon looking at the water tower and listening to 'What a Fool Believes' on the radio. The wise man has the power / to reason away / what seems to be. As the sun began to set, President Jimmy Carter came on the radio. He started giving his speech about our national malaise, and he told a whole nation to come down off its water tower. I was thinking, Do I have a malaise? Right in the middle of Carter's speech, the guy on the water tower decided to come down. The police hustled him to an ambulance and drove off into the 80s.'

Jefferson Morley, 'Twentysomething', 1988

Bogus Journey

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 04:59:56 +1100

'The writers of classical antiquity were on the whole as little concerned with the future as the past. Thucydides believed that nothing significant had happened in time before the events which he described, and that nothing significant was likely to happen thereafter. History was not going anywhere: because there was no sense of the past, there was equally no sense of the future... It was the Jews, and after them, the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal toward which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and a purpose, but at the expense of losing its secular character.'

E.H. Carr, 1961.

The weak become heroes

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:12:11 +1100

'The class struggle is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.'

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

'I realize five years went by I'm older / Memories smoulder winter's colder / But that same piano loops over and over and over'

The Streets, 'Weak Become Heroes', 2002

Choose a fucking big television

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:10:30 +1100

"The range of choice open to an individual is not the deciding factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual... Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide range of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear."

Herbert Marcuse, 'One Dimensional Man', 1964

The songs that saved your life

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 22:50:23 +1100

'The lapse from ceremony and ritual in much of public life has left a vacuum. At the same time, there is a search for magical and transformational forms. The capacity of organized religion to satisfy this thirst diminishes. Today, one feels that in many educated but imperfectly coherent lives that 'poetry of religious emotion' is being provided by music. The point is not easy to demonstrate... but one does know of a good many familial or individual existences in which the performance or enjoyment of music has functions as subtly indispensible, as exalting and consoling as religious practices might have, or might have had fomerly. It is this indispensibility which strikes one, the feeling (which I share) that there is music one cannot do without for long, that certain pieces of music are the talisman of order and of trust inside oneself.'

George Steiner, 1971

'The passing of time

And all of it's sickening crimes

Is making me sad again

But don't forget the songs

That made you cry

And the songs that saved your life'

The Smiths, 'Rubber Ring', 1986

Major teen breakthrough

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 03:33:03 +1100

"Before Elvis, rock had been a gesture of vague rebellion. Once he'd happened, it immediately became solid, self-contained, and then it spawned its own style in clothes and language and sex, a total independence in almost everything, all the things that are now taken for granted. This was the major teen breakthrough and Elvis triggered it. In this way, he became one of the people who have radically affected the way that people think and live."

Nik Cohn, 'Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom', 1968.

Public enemy

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 00:30:12 +1100

'I have not the slightest feel of humility toward the public'

John Keats, April 1818

'It is, of course, easier to be respectful and reverent to 'the People...' than to a public, which noisily identifies itself. However the immediate argument went, whatever the reactions of actual readers, there was thus available a final appeal to the 'embodied spirit of the people': that is to say, to an idea, an ideal reader, a standard that might be set above the clamour of the writer's actual relations with society. The 'embodied spirit', naturally enough, was a very welcome alternative to the market.'

Raymond Williams, on Wordsworth, 1958

Something grabs a hold of me tightly

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:07:17 +1100

'Poe tells of a sailor who finds himself swirling to destruction on the walls of a notorious whirlpool. At first he is naturally overcome with panic and despair. Soon, however, his scientific curiousity gets the better of his fear, and he notices that by studying the behaviour of the lethal current, he can predict the action of the maelstrom.'

Jonathan Miller, 1971

'It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator that gave him the thread which led him out of the labyrinth. Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference. But the time for anger and protest is in the early stages of a new process. The present stage is extremely advanced. Moreover, it is full, not only of destructiveness but also of promises of rich new developments to which moral indignation is a very poor guide.'

Marshall McLuhan, 'The Mechanical Bride', 1951

'Some things I think you have to like for... wrong reasons.'

Mike Patton on Vanilla Ice, 1991.

Who's going to write?

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:08:41 +1100

"They said: 'we think you are a great R&B band, but the Beatles have set a trend of groups writing their own material, the Stones write their own material. You've just really got to do it.' So away we walked, and everybody looked around and said 'Who's going to write?'... "

Pete Townshend, 1974

Armageddon it

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 06:42:16 +1100

"And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied, imploding sheet - the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below - And just before you're pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines - And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward - Just before all this, your best friend cranes his neck, leans over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, "There, I've always wanted to do that."

Douglas Coupland, 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture', 1991.

Art for Art's sake

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:04:44 +1100

"Art for art's sake is a piece of slang that does not mean the harmless thing it seems to mean. An art cultivated professedly by a few, who would consider it necessary to despise the common herd, to hold themselves aloof from all that the world has been struggling for, to guard carefully every approach to their palace of art. That art at last will seem too delicate a thing for even the hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated must at last sit still and do nothing - to the grief of no-one."

William Morris, Birmingham, 1879

As sinister as it seems

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 08:44:19 +1100

"Passion as workout! The musclebound exhbitionism of soul works as a boast - see the depth of my feeling, hear the wealth of my emotion! See how I am moved! Yes it is quite as sinister as it seems. 'Totalitarianism' is not too strong a word. This humanistic vision of vigour and common purpose simply writes out deviancy, strange pain, breakdown of communication, the incapacity to be 'moved'. Even when the soul man is hurt, it is only a celebration of his ability to be touched. Today, every voice in pop must be a Voice, because today, anything less than a raucous tear-blob sounds simply feeble on Planet Pop, must die like a runt."

Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs, 'The Death of Soul', 1987